Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/212

210 Burgundians, German Hanseatics, Lombards, and Easterlings, and all other foreigners. The Scots and French are omitted in this list, probably because there were no merchants of those nations resident in England, though some trade was, no doubt, carried on with both.

A document of the following year, found in the same repository, affords us a list of what were then accounted the wealthiest and most important cities and towns in England—the security for the marriage portion of two hundred and fifty thousand gold crowns to be paid with Henry's daughter Mary, when it was proposed to marry her to the Emperor Maximilian's grandson, Charles (afterwards the Emperor Charles V.). On this occasion the towns that became bound for Henry's performance of his engagement were, London, Coventry, Norwich, Chester, Worcester, Exeter, York, Bristol, Southampton, Boston, Hull, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The short space of time comprehended in the reign of Henry VII. of England is memorable for the two greatest events in the history of nautical discovery and of modern commerce,—the achievement of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and the revelation of the new world of America by the voyage of Columbus. Both these great discoveries were made in the search after the same object, a route to India by sea, which serves in some degree to account for the two having been so nearly coincident in point of time. Bartholomew Diaz returned to Portugal from the voyage in which he had rounded the southern extremity of Africa in December, 1487. Some years before this date, however, Columbus had conceived his more brilliant idea of reaching the oriental world by sailing towards the west; a course which, on his conviction of the earth's rotundity, he calculated would bring him to the eastern confines of the same golden continent the western parts of which were gained by proceeding in the opposite direction. Among the various states and crowned heads to which the illustrious Genoese proposed the glory of his great enterprise before he found a patroness in Isabella of Spain, one was our Henry VII., to whom he sent his brother Bartholomew in 1488. In